Websites nowadays mostly gear towards getting high traffic volume. This is because the more people visit their site, the higher the possibility of generating income. This is especially true to sites that belong to the buy and sell category and to those who offer various kinds of services through the Internet.
Paid advertisements could increase traffic volume towards a site but another way to do it would be through search engines. Use of search engines is the primary method of web navigation for almost all Internet users. To get high rankings on search engine result listing means more chances of getting visited by web surfers.

Now that majority of web traffic is directed by major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google, you would want your site to be found by search engines and your content be put into their databases so that it could be easily made available to Internet users.
On a quick note, SEO is about improving traffic site from a search engine towards a particular website via search results. This is done by making a site’s content and design accessible and easier to be indexed by search engine crawlers.
There are many ways on how to optimize a site and some of these techniques could be done by anyone who has time to sit down in front of a computer and manipulate websites. Some techniques that you could do yourself are building links, selecting a proper domain name, text formatting, content revision, and putting the right body and keywords in a site.

There are also books that you could buy and online forums you could visit if you want assistance in doing SEO. Aside from that, major search engines also give assistance to webmasters by providing information and guidelines that could help with site optimization. Google has Sitemaps which helps webmasters learn if they are having any problems with indexing a site and at the same time provides data on Google traffic to the site. Yahoo, on the other hand, has Site Explorer which provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine the number of pages in the Yahoo! index, and view link information.
These do-it-yourself ways could really improve a site’s ranking in search engines. However, results from these could be way behind from results of SEOs performed by providers. There are many notable providers today that offer many different ways on how they would improve web traffic to your site by making your ranking in search engines go up. These techniques are rather technical in nature and involve in-depth knowledge about how search engines work.
SEO experts usually fine-tune a site’s contents and design to make it easier to be indexed by search engines. They also improve your link popularity.

Moreover, the best reason for working with experts is that they are equipped with tools, knowledge, and tricks that could get you the attention of major search engines.
The option of doing SEO yourself or hiring experts actually depends on the nature of the website. Though, realistically speaking, everyone wants their site to be visited by many surfers, there are sites that need more traffic than others. Usually, sites that need great volume of traffic are those that are into the buy and sell business or ones that are built to promote business opportunities.